A PROPHET FOR OUR TIME (January 14, 2007 by Richard K. Gorski aka “Mike”)
There are moments, lately, when I wonder how did my country, or what I believed was my country, become so different. Oh, I suppose it could be suggested, that I’m merely experiencing the common disconnect between different age groups. But I’m not referring to the fact that children have to instruct me on how to operate a cell phone or when I was at a checkout counter and was struggling to pull my wallet out of my back pocket and the young woman behind me casually says “Here, let me do that for you”. No, that isn’t what it is that make me feel my country is changing.
What I am referring to are small but ubiquitous forms in public address that makes me feel like I’m living out one of those movies where there are signs of impending doom but no one seems to notice, or worse, care!
Today, legislators who have robbed the most helpless of Americans end their speeches with “God bless you”, perhaps to imply that the crimes were more than likely God’s will. Or worse, the leader of a religion, saying that God speaks to them, and then, having corporate media presenting those expressions as if they are facts worthy of attention. And, most disturbing, is that there seems to be no public contention as to the veracity of those statements.
It is the sense I had, in the fifties, of living in a democracy that was moving to achieve equality of opportunity, the liberty to find the knowledge and skills to become what we wanted to be, if we were able, isn’t as bright and promising as it was in1940s and ‘50s.
No doubt, in those years, America’s production of armaments, foods, and industrial tools for the Allies brought about a rise in income and the quality of life up from the pain of hopelessness experienced in the Depression, but it was also the belief that we were working together to save the promise of Democracy and the New Deal and Social Security seemed evidence of that.
A mark of the difference of that time to today was when inductees to military service took the oath of allegiance to America, we didn’t have to accede to an unnatural power or the beliefs of religions other than our own. It was a time when we could blame the government for a loss in value of the dollar. We didn’t have to trust god to maintain its value.
It was a time when a good number of Americans felt that scholarship in public affairs was a source for guidance and insight into human relationships. Business was still, largely, a beneficiary of our free society not the power that has achieved control over our society.
The growing bank of knowledge in sociology, political sciences, anthropology, and the experience of living through the first 50 years of the of the 20th Century was eroding belief that our affairs were governed by some unnatural power. We knew individuals and groups of people working together provided most of the solutions for social problems. The obvious fact that subjecting African Americans to the indignity of being addressed as unworthy of respect or opportunity was a matter of political power and not the fiat of some unnatural power, became the recognition that discrimination were unconstitutional, if its language is to be trusted. That was the America I knew from 1939 through to the 1960’s.
However, there were changes occurring that I didn’t recognize then, that would be a threat to a free society. Joseph McCarthy and Father Coughlin opened the door to the use of television and large corporate media to shape information for their interests and not for a free society. Politicians and leaders of various religions using the traditions shaped a century before and carried forward by family life and biblical based religions use radio and television to frighten people into accepting their proposals. The use of traditions of religion and family conditioning for political control over the community for personal power and gain begins to be more apparent at that time.
In my America, Unitarians were having difficulty in being at ease with the idea they had to believe there was a god. Many of them, by turning to philosophy, found a way to express what they believed was religion ought to be about.
Regardless that John Dewey, a towering figure in philosophy, psychology, and education never committed himself to the Unitarian Association, for many Unitarians, at that time, he served as a prophet. Beginning with his lecture at the turn of the 19th Century to the Divinity students at the University of Michigan to the Terry lectures at Yale University in 1933, he spoke to issues of the mind that, as a philosopher, he felt applied to religion.
In 1933, in six of the Terry lectures at Yale, John Dewey presented a description of the experience of being religious and the primary concerns of religion that I hope will be of interest to UUs. In these lectures Dewey makes the case that maintaining our community as a social entity is as much a religious experience as conducting rites and ceremonies of a religion. I find confirmation of this daily. Every day I hear of in acts of heroism based upon an individual feeling that they had to, as fellow humans, risk their lives to save others, and every day people report their pleasure in being of service to others with same sense of self fulfillment and often a more genuine personal sacrifice than those who claim they have sacrificed in carrying out a religious rite or ceremony.
Dewey introduced another way to look at religion. He begins; “The core of a religion is described in the form of rites and ceremonies. Legends and myths grow up in part as decorative dressings, in response to the irrepressible human tendency toward story-telling, and in part as attempts to explain ritual practices. Then as culture advances, stories are consolidated, and theogonies and cosmogonies are formed, as with the Babylonians, Egyptians, Hebrews and Greeks.”
Dewey points out that the need to organize and explain the function of these practices required special classes of individuals: priests and theologians. I believe it is important to recognize that such groups create for a religion a codification of its rites and basic assumptions that affect the role its lay members play in the society they live in.
Many of us were born into a religion. It has been an important force in our lives, even to determining careers. But, unlike nations that function by the rules of a religion, in America and other secular states religions are chartered by the state. In order for any religion to be treated as a religion it has to be recognized by the state. We can join any religion we want to, and are usually welcomed. Dewey reminds us that our associations with different religions are like those that we may have with other organizations in a secular nation. This freedom changes the way we relate to others. Over the past holidays we can find in our own experiences evidence of these changes. Painful as it is for some individuals, in different commercial sites “merry Christmas” has been changed to “happy holidays”, especially by those interests who do not wish to offend those who have other concerns with the calendar.
Dewey also makes clear that there is no creditable evidence that the emotional experience claimed to be religious is any difference to the moments when we feel lifted in our sense of self to the feeling of joy in the circumstances we find ourselves in or the intimate sense of compassion for another, and I would add the deep sadness of the loss of a companion or the injury done to our community by others.
Now that I think of it, has anyone here heard a hero say in words like “I dove into the rapids to save those kids because God told me to”, or “it was the Christian thing to do?
After Dewey describes the history of the changes in structure and demands of current religions over the preceding nineteen hundreds of years, he concludes “What has been gained is that religion has been placed upon its only real and solid foundation the direct relationship of conscience and will to God.”
Dewey then points out that the improvements in the conditions of life that has continued to grow in those past nineteen thousand years came not from religion but individuals solving for them selves and their communities the problems of life.
“Religions”, says Dewey, “have turned their chief attention in social affairs to moral symptoms, to vices and abuses like drunkenness, sales of intoxicants, divorce, rather than to the cause of war and of the long list of economic and political injuries and oppressions.”
Protests against the latter have been mainly left to secular movements.”
He also observed that the structure of the organization of religions has change to fit the contemporary world. I would say that though the pope is better educated than Pat Robertson, they both operate like Chief Executive Officers. Neither is elected by the members of their organization, a Board of officers elect them. UUs are democrat-ically organized, our policies, practices, and officers are created and shaped by our members at our annual meetings.
The issue for Dewey is that a religion, based upon the direct relationship of conscience and will to God, cannot make the real problems of life its prime concern for action.
The impact of these thoughts upon Unitarians, specifically, can be seen in the principles we affirm, that are presented on the back of the program, as commitments worthy of a religious pursuit.